You know, you're absolutely right. The name of this "rivalry" isn't important because the rivalry is a manufactured one, devoid of natural emotion. ?his does not in any way deny that EWU has a good team.
With what university would there be natural emotion for an authentic rivalry for Portland State? I think, if we were football members of the Mountain West, that natural rivalries would be realized (with real emotion) opposite a university (or universities) that is very much like our own.
Given a potential future state in which quality of teams was largely equivalent, I would say Boise State or San Jose State would make for a natural rival for PSU. Not as things currently stand, of course. The difference in quality is significant now, but the qualitative similarities between our university and these two institutions would very likely set the stage for real emotion to come to the fore.
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San Jose State versus Portland State (Silicon Valley versus Silicon Forest)
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Boise State versus Portland State (PSU never played so well as a D-II team as when playing Boise State)
Establishing emotional linkage as this is important to our university's authentic development. I agree that the imposition of an artificial rivalry naturally falls flat. It does not contribute to the authentic development. It is, in fact, a distortion, a ruse. There is no question that such kind of leadership leads us to believe in a lie. The best thing to do is to make the investment to rise up and out of the FCS into a conference of look-alikes.
Right now, we have a set of only three natural rivals: Sac State, UC-Davis and Cal Poly. The others are of a different character that do not engage our kind of character sufficiently or in the way needed. Thus, we cannot be but impeded in establishing our own identity. PSU is like a teenager now with the choice to rebel or give in to parental authority. For its own sake, I say PSU needs to assert itself politically.
The politics of distorted identity (the source of PSU's disconnect) was first engaged by some protectorate state politicians in 1955 when Portland State became a college and these meddlers shackled the college's natural course of development. Portland State has suffered chronically from distortional development as a result. Portland State needs to break free of this political stranglehold and proceed according to its own healthy course of development. Only in this way can it establish its true identity.
May I say, in the spirit of the 1960s,
Off these pigs! Let get these pigs off our back and burgeon forward in authenticity, what PSU would have been if the meddlers had not interfered. Let's get righteously angry.